


While You're Outside, Looking In

by waltzmatildah



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:48:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jesse knows he’s dreaming, he’s just not sure what about…</p>
<p>---------</p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <i>Black-brown hair tangles between his fingers, ties them together tightly. He grins, pushes his nose towards the nape of her neck and inhales all the way to his toes. She giggles and sound fills his head to over-flowing.</i></p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <i>“G’day mate!” </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	While You're Outside, Looking In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [withthepilot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/withthepilot/gifts).



There’s a crack. And a spray of arterial _red_ , sticky and hot, hot, hot, abstract-paints the truck to his left.

Sound melts. Dissolves and leaks and floods like rivers over his shoes. 

Between his fingers.

There’s running. Running. But his feet are stuck where they stand. Cemented to the sand and the gravel. And he figures escape and evade is futile now anyway. A target indelibly inked onto his sternum.

 

 

 

[It’s not ‘til the plane is waiting at what he imagines must be some kind of stop sign on the edge of the runway that he makes his confession.

“The last time I was in one of these things, I chundered so freaking bad. You have no idea…”

His knuckles are white where he’s got his fingers gripped around the armrests. He has no idea if Jane heard him or not, his eyes are front and centre and there’s next to zero chance he’s moving them any time soon.

Or blinking them.

Or, like, _half_ blinking them.

“Vomit and I’ll demand they let me sit somewhere else. I’ll swear I don’t know you and I’ll pretend some of your carrot chunks got on my jeans and make them move me to first class…”

“Way to be supportive, babe. Just… way.”

“You do get that this is a _fourteen gazillion hour flight_ right? You absolutely must – not – vomit. I do not do supportive when it comes to recycled foodstuffs.”

“’Foodstuffs’?”

What the _actual_ fuck?

“Is that like, stuff that was once food?”

 

 

He slips the word _Christchurch_ randomly into their conversations thirty six times in the first three hours of their flight.

He knows this because he keeps a running tally.

And the only reason he doesn’t make it to fifty, his goal, is because Jane eventually falls asleep with her head in his lap. 

He traces glasses and a fake mo on her face with the pad of one finger and makes a note to let her know how freaking lucky she’d been that he didn’t have a Magic Marker handy.

That shit _never gets old…_

 

 

“Jesse, Jesse quick. Wake up-”

He does.

His head bouncing off the window shade violently in the process.

“What? Are we crashing? Oh, fuck, oh-”

Hands, warm and soft, clamp to the sides of this face, and he stops flailing about with his seatbelt for long enough to look at her.

“We’re not crashing!”

“We’re not?”

He looks around frantically, still not convinced. But there’s relative calm and a flight attendant passes by their seats, offers him a cursory smile on the way through.

“We’re not.”

“Well, thank fuck. I am the worst fucking swimmer…” He leans back into his seat. Tilts his head back and shuts his eyes and presses one hand to his heart, all dramatic-like.

“Hey,” he hears, risks opening one eye again. “Aren’t you interested in what I wanted to show you?”

He frowns. She’s grinning in a way that can only mean one thing.

“Please tell me you got us tickets to the Mile High Club. I will love you forever.”

She reaches across him slowly, flips open his seatbelt suggestively and with her eyebrows raised.

“I love you, too…”]

 

 

 

Breathing around the white noise in his chest is getting more and more difficult. A face blanks out the hot, hot sun.

“Jesse.”

And he wants to reply with something obscene because, well, who the fuck else? But he can’t because his lips no longer move on command and making sound would require air in his lungs.

He’s pretty sure there is no air left there anymore…

 

 

 

[He wakes lazily. If that’s even possible. Warm and soft and a thousand other adjectives that rhyme with kitten fuzz.

Which, nothing does but… _whatever_.

Black-brown hair tangles between his fingers, ties them together tightly. He grins, pushes his nose towards the nape of her neck and inhales all the way to his toes. She giggles and sound fills his head to over-flowing.

“G’day mate!” Heavy twang laced through every awkward syllable.

He’s sure she slides her eyes to open just so she can roll them at him dramatically. 

“You do realise that Austra-”

He cuts her off with his lips. Because he can. Knows full well where they are and, more importantly, where they’re most definitely not.

Also knows how to push her buttons.

All of them.

He struggles to sitting up and bounces a cigarette out of its box. Sends a silent prayer to the God of all things Duty Free and cups his palm around the flame of his lighter as she fights to blow it out.

“You said you were going to quit…”

“I am,” he counters, smiles lopsidedly around the butt, “… going to.”

She coughs with exaggerated vigour and waves her hands about expansively in a show that actually does very little to disperse the acrid smoke. He’d feel bad if she wasn’t so damn _entertaining…_

“So, _Frodo_.” 

She rolls her eyes again and he chalks up one more victory beneath his name. Decides that particular scoreboard is starting to look supremely uneven.

Loves it.

“What’s on the _ay-gendah_ for today?”

She pulls the covers back over her head and feigns loud, rattling snores that don’t sound so far off from her real ones and he tosses the half smoked cigarette into the souvenir store ashtray beside the bed. Burrows beneath the covers after her.

“Heh, lazy bi-artch. That’s what you think. Don’t you got no _snowboarding_ or _bush hiking_ or _sheep herding_ lined up to-”

She digs her fingertips into his ribcage then. Cuts him off expertly as he loses all track of coherent thought.

 

 

They’re both breathless when she finally shows some mercy. Plants her lips square on his forehead by way of calling _truce_ , before…

“Sheep herding? Why would we even _want_ to go _sheep herding?_ ”

He shrugs, as though the answer is perfectly obvious. “Ain’t that what the locals are all into round here?”

 

 

In the end they do nothing. Drag themselves from the warmth of the covers half an hour later to find night has well and truly fallen and jet lag has them firmly in her grasp.

He chain smokes through an entire pack of twenty on the balcony of their motel room. Lights the next cigarette from the dying embers of the last and tries not to think too hard about the stars in the sky above his head and why they look so much the same as the ones he left behind.

She cooks them pasta on the stove and calls out things he supposes he’s meant to find interesting. Like the word _Celsius_. Uses it in a sentence like maybe he’s never heard it before.

And he loves her, he really does. But _Jesus_.

Seriously?]

 

 

 

He blinks. Slow. The sky above him is blue.

Blue. Blue. Blue.

It takes him several slow turning seconds to realise that the stars have disappeared. Then several more to figure out that they probably won’t be coming back.

_Jane…_ he thinks. _Hey…_

_Maybe I’ll see you soon…_

 

 

 

[This much snow, he decides, is really fucking _cold_. Which, well, duh, but yeah.

_Way too fucking cold…_

But Jane’s wearing a winter coat zipped up to beneath her chin, and there’re flakes of the stuff dusting her hair, settling on her eyelashes, landing on her tongue as she sticks it out at him, running, arms spread wide.

He laughs. Breathless. Waits until she passes him by before taking off after her.

She lets him catch her. He knows this because she’s faster than he’ll ever be. He can never catch her until she decides she wants to be caught…

“Are we’re really doing this?” He whispers the words into her neck, incredulous, inhales the smell of her with the practiced ease of someone who’s done too much of exactly that in the past. Lets her fill his insides all the way to overflowing.

She wriggles until they’re face to face. Eye to eye.

Nose to Eskimo kissing nose.

“Yeah, we are. We really are doing this.”]

 

 

 

He feels endlessly heavy. Like he’s pulling a thousand positive g’s.

Like someone’s swapped out all his insides, replaced them with concrete and bricks and lead.

 

 

His tongue runs the length of his chapped lips. The gravel beneath him is grinding into the back of his head and he swears the only sound he can hear is the sandy scuttle of the ink-backed bugs that call this part of the desert home.

He imagines them eating through his eyeballs. Making a home inside his useless skull.

Someone’s shouting his name.

Still.

_Jesse, Jesse, Jesse, JesseJesseJesseJesse…_

Jane.

Not Jane.

Mr. White.

_Oh._

 

 

 

[She lures him back to their hotel room with promises of beer and sex and pizza. All his favourite things.

Well. Most of them.

There are some that they no longer talk about.]

 

 

 

He’s dragged to his feet roughly.

“Jesus Christ, Pinkman.”

Mr. White’s lost his hat. And his pants are fucking filthy. He thinks he might be missing some time. Like someone’s hacked into his brain cells and carved out the ones he’d set aside for remembering what the fuck just went down.

“What the fuck-” _just went down?_ He asks for the information instead.

“For future reference…” Mr. White’s got one hand on his hip, the other is outstretched, finger pointed, “When someone starts shooting a gun at you, you don’t just stand there like you’re the goddamn Statue of David.”

Hands settle on his shoulders, fingers tight. Too tight.

He shakes.

No, _he is shaken_.

“You stupid fool. I thought you were dead…”

_I thought I was dead, too,_ he doesn’t quite manage to say.

_Sorry, Jane…_

 

 

They stumble back through the shifting sand to the car. Mr. White keeps looking sideways at him and twitching his head, like he’s endlessly disappointed. 

Which is nothing new, not really, so, screw him.

They skirt the body of their would-be murderer. Jesse hadn’t recognised him at the start and he definitely doesn’t recognise him now. Not with half his fucking face blown to bits.

He wonders, briefly, if Mr. White did that. 

Then he decides he doesn’t think he’ll wonder about that anymore.

Because, _Jesus fuck._

 

 

 

[He fists his fingers into her hair. It’s still snow-damp and he wants to make it shower-damp.

He wants to make _her_ shower- _wet_.

He thinks he’s frozen through to his freaking bone marrow. He thinks he never wants to be anything else. Not if it means… _this._ ]


End file.
